We help B2B companies optimize their sales and marketing performance to execute on a growth strategy, grow sales and drive profitability.

Through our Commercial Excellence work, we have helped clients generate significant incremental revenue growth, typically in the 3-7% range, and in some cases over 10%. And, this type of work often generates results in the short-term where measurable improvements take place in sales pipelines, customer wins, sales growth and margins, and team morale.

Our Commercial Excellence work includes:

Customer Segmentation

A Data Science driven approach to understand characteristics of customer groups and how our clients can use this information to grow sales and profits

Go-to-Market Strategy

Optimizing the mix of sales and service resources, e-commerce and channel partners to reach and serve customers more profitably

Commercial Organization

Organizing to win by addressing accountabilities, roles, decision rights, structure, capabilities, incentives and deployment of commercial resources

Salesforce Effectiveness

Raising salesforce productivity by improving targeting, lead generation, win rates, sales operations support, and KPI tracking and tools

Pricing

Improving price and contribution margin realization across customers, products and services, and channels

Groove Strategy Group brings a holistic approach in order to help our clients pull the right levers to drive organic growth. 

We help determine how to capitalize upon market opportunities given organizational capabilities, people, resources, technology and investment capital.  We assist clients with decision-support in these areas and can then establish an implementation program to drive the right actions and realize the benefits.

When should you call us?  Look for these signs:

  • Flat or declining sales and margins
  • Recent losses – customers, key salespeople and other talent
  • Relying on discounts to close sales
  • It’s not clear to your commercial organization what the growth strategy is nor how to execute it
  • Treating all customers with the same service level regardless of their financial value to your business
  • Consistently falling short on selling your company’s portfolio of offerings of products and services
  • Customer, product and service profitability are not well understood, nor do they take into account the costs to serve and costs to sell to a given customer
  • Struggling to get the right mix for direct sales, e-commerce and channel partners
 

Customer Segmentation

Customer Segmentation for B2B companies has become vitally important to understand defining characteristics of customer groups that can be acted upon.  Not every customer is worth the same to a business, and how your company sells to and serves each customer matters greatly to your success.   We combine Data Science techniques with proven, client-tested methodologies to analyze large amounts of data and generate insights and actionable opportunities. 

With a differentiated customer segmentation in place, companies can:

  • Focus more on their best and most promising customers, not just the largest ones
  • Offer different value propositions to different segments to drive overall growth
  • Inform their Go-to-Market Strategy, which helps to bring a Growth Strategy to life
  • Adjust their costs to sell and costs to serve for customers to manage contribution margins

Groove Strategy Group leverages Data Science techniques to help our clients:

  • Identify the combination of firmographic, financial and behavioral characteristics of each customer, and how customers should be grouped into discrete segments
  • Develop a clear baseline on customer and sales profitability for each customer and for each segment, including adjusting for costs to sell and to serve
  • Understand how customers transact and want to be served
  • Prioritize customers and segments, and ensure strong alignment to overall growth strategy
  • Adjust their value propositions and key messages to market to discrete segments
  • Assess the impacts to your Go-to-Market approach and commercial organization

Go-to-Market Strategy

  • An effective Go-to-Market Strategy is a must have for B2B companies, especially for those whose customers increasingly look to buy and be supported with an omni-channel experience.  The right Go-to-Market approach will help to optimize allocation of sales and support resources to maximize growth and profitability.  It will align with your Growth Strategy and will enable your company to make the necessary trade-offs in terms of targeting customers, optimizing channels, investing in people, capabilities and technology, and, ultimately, realizing profitable growth.

We help our clients to:

    • Determine the optimal route-to-market for customers and segments, and the appropriate service level given their value to the business
    • Assess the performance of products and service offerings by route to inform prioritization and identify potential opportunities for growth
    • Understand areas of under or over-resourcing of sales and service people to inform how best to pursue target customer segments
    • Identify potential opportunities to improve the consistency of pricing and contribution margin realization across routes

Commercial Organization

  • Executing any Growth Strategy requires a Commercial Organization that is designed to win.  Many B2B companies face challenges such as: 
  • Structure and roles that do not align with the Growth Strategy, Customer Segmentation and Go-to-Market Strategy, resulting in under-performance
  • Overly focused on products at the expense of customer focus
  • Unclear decision rights and decision-making approach that lead to gaps in accountability
  • Misaligned incentives that reward a portion of the product and service portfolio, often at the expense of selling broader, more profitable solutions
  • A sales team that is disconnected from a service team, which can lead to frustrated customers
  • Our work also addresses the change management side of commercial improvement and transformation.  Despite the increasingly data and technology driven world of B2B sales, relationships with customers and partners are critical to success.  And real sales improvements need to be enabled by healthy commercial organizations where people are set up to succeed.  

Our clients call us to:

  • Identify and objectively assess underlying organizational issues that contribute to under-performance
  • Bring fresh ideas on alternative organizational options that help address key issues
  • Solve the details, helping to ensure that new organizational approaches can be implemented 
  • Support change management efforts to address concerns and interests of their people and key stakeholders
  • Provide implementation support to help them move to a new commercial organizational model

Salesforce Effectiveness

  • Improving Salesforce Effectiveness can also be an area of need for B2B companies.  Even if other areas of commercial performance are strong, companies may experience a need to raise salesforce productivity.   
Our clients call us to help them:
    • Improve sales resource deployment such as account, end market and geographic coverage; and outside, inside and technical sales resource levels
    • Clarify roles and responsibilities, such as those of ‘hunters’ and ‘farmers’
    • Assess quality, quantity, and consistency of targeting and lead generation
    • Identify best performers and related practices to generate more and better leads and close sales
    • Improve the type and level of support from internal sales operations
    • Modify or help set up KPI performance reporting and dashboards

Pricing

  • Effective contribution margin management must include Pricing. Many B2B companies struggle to get the right pricing approach that aligns with the value they deliver to their customers.  Adding to the challenge are factors such as mature, competitive markets; inflation; complex product and service portfolios with multiple routes to market; and reliable and accessible data to support the pricing analytics.
Our clients call us to help them:
    • Determine the realized price and contribution margins for customers, products and services, and across routes-to-market
    • Understand the total impacts of discount and trade promotion programs and pinpoint excessive giveaways to improve margins
    • Shape new pricing approaches and policies that better match their value proposition and target customers
    • Identify specific customers, products and services where pricing can be improved

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Contact Groove Strategy Group to discuss how we can help your company grow profitably.

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